


red right hand

by faradays



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Espionage, F/M, Mafia AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:42:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24471478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faradays/pseuds/faradays
Summary: When he was undercover, Jon once had to sit through a twelve-hour drive with the infamous Craster, eight trafficked girls shivering in the cargo hold and a Beretta sweating in the cupholder between them. Having immersed himself in conditions of threat for so long, he knows only too well the slim shades of difference between safety and danger, and how easily the two can slip into each other’s guises, like hands in a glove. In the days and months since he’s resurfaced into normal life, every moment has felt as though he were careening into traffic with his brakes cuts.But now he’s here in the room with her and her inscrutable look, and the rush is there but the fear is gone. He wants to jump. He wants to put his hands on the wheel and drive.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 16
Kudos: 65





	red right hand

SOMEWHERE IN THE WESTERLANDS, 05.32

They’re alone, finally, save for the distant, drunken yelping of the teenagers on the other side of the grassy dunes, and the body being lapped up in the foamy surf next to them. The grey line of the ocean trembles as it drags up pink and gold sparks against the glassy surface of the beach. The cold is starting to seep through his trousers, up his back. He can’t feel his legs. 

‘Now would be a very good time to kiss me,’ he informs her, and Sansa leans down. She’s never usually so obliging, so the situation must be grave indeed. He can’t bring himself to care. Not when her mouth is petal-soft against his, and when she tastes so sweet, but also like something slightly warm and smoky and metallic, like gunpowder. Like blood pumping away from the heart.

When she pulls her mouth away from his, he opens his eyes and sees the clouds melting and the seabirds wheeling up ahead. Oh, it’s so stupid. To be moved by something like birds at a time like this. When he should be spending these last moments repenting all his sins, and there have been so many, a whole litany of them. She’ll have to burn a whole forest of candles for him when he’s gone, if she’s the sept-going type, which she’s not. If she’ll care to remember him at all. Hopefully she will care. He wants, so badly, for her to care for him. 

Maybe she does. Her hands are cradling his head, her perfect mouth is moving above him, though it’s like a radio, the needle careening wildly between indistinct stations. Looking for something, a signal in a sea of static. They’re right here. Come find them. Or not. Or just leave them here, in the growing dark. That is a good end for him. Better than he deserves. 

She bends over him again, and leans her cheek against his collarbone. Her breath against his neck is the warmest thing in the world.

  
  
  
-

KING’S LANDING, TEN MONTHS AGO

‘She goes by Alayne Stone now,’ Stannis says, sliding her photograph across the table. ‘After Stark’s death, the kids were farmed out to relatives. Sansa went to live with an aunt at the Eyrie, and hasn’t been back north since. Nor has she had any meaningful contact with the rest of her family, as far as we know.’ 

It’s this last bit that really gets Jon’s attention, because it takes a hell of a lot to get Stannis to prevaricate on anything. In another life, Jon’s certain his boss would’ve been the leader of a religious cult, clad in billowing robes and ranting about hellfire and brimstone. Thank goodness MI5 stepped in and recruited Stannis’ penchant for dogma when it did; he’d have looked extremely stupid in a robe. 

Jon picks up the photograph, and Alayne Stone or Sansa Stark or whoever looks back at him. It’s one of those pictures they make you take at school, with the mottled blue background that might be trying to pass for the essence of scholarship, or clouds. Her hands are folded on the table in front of her, and her red hair is pushed back by a cloth Alice band in her school colours. Her smile looks like it hasn’t reached her eyes in a while. 

‘She’s older now,’ says Stannis, with his love of stating the obvious. ‘She’s currently finishing a PhD in some kind of old poetry shit at King's. So no job prospects on the horizon, obviously, but she seems like an obliging, cooperative sort of girl. Was happy enough to come down and speak to us on such short notice. Even you can’t fuck this one up, Snow.’

‘A ringing endorsement, if I’ve ever heard one,’ says Jon, tossing Sansa’s school photo back onto the table. ‘Really warms the cockles of my heart.’ An old pain flickers up somewhere beneath his ribs. It’s not debilitating, not anymore, but it reminds him that he’s not funny. Ygritte’s Jon was funny, and that was another life. 

‘I don’t give a shit about your cockles or anything otherwise pertaining to your person,’ says Stannis in a clipped, offended tone, stuffing Sansa Stark’s photo back to the front of her overflowing file. ‘You’re not a fucking agent out in the field anymore, remember that. Your job is to talk to the girl and find out what she knows about Robb and Arya Stark and the Freys. Get me some answers, or else I’m chaining you to desk duty for life, and setting you on fucking fire. Do we understand each other?’ 

‘Aye,’ says Jon, mild as a summer breeze. 

-

Yeah, they’ve all seen and done some pretty messed-up shit. But they’re fucking MI5, you won’t hear them crying about it to their mothers, or to anyone, really. Stannis had forced him to see someone after Ygritte, and he tried again after the car bomb that killed Edd, but Jon had refused point-blank, and that’s when he’d been pulled from the field. There was just no point. No amount of professional help would make him forget what it felt like to try and pack Edd’s hot, slippery guts back into the cavity of his body, before realising that his entire bottom half had been taken in the explosion. Speaking to a stranger about Ygritte growing rigid in his arms — when he knew first-hand how soft and pliable she could be, when you found her at the right moment — will not ever allow him to forgive himself. 

The therapist assigned to him after Ygritte had told him that trauma can never be fully exorcised; it can only be more fully integrated into your memories, so you can come to a better, healthier understanding of its place in your life. But like, fuck that. None of that sounds appealing to Jon whatsoever. Most of the men and women he works with are like this too. They’ve all found their own short-cut to coping, like Margaery with anonymous sex, and Pyp and Grenn both taking to drink like self-respecting professionals. ‘I cook chickens,’ confessed Sam one drunken night at the pub. ‘A whole roast chicken, every Sunday night, trimmings and everything. Then I throw the whole thing in the bin, and then I take out the rubbish.’ Rinse and repeat every week for the past five years. ‘On particularly bad weeks, I’ll make some roast potatoes and chuck them out as well. If I can’t make my chicken that week for some reason,’ said Sam. ‘Like if Gilly’s made plans, or if Sainsbury's runs out of whole chickens? I go mental.’ 

The better-adjusted of them develop a sense of humour about the whole thing, which is clearly the level of zen that Dr Maegyr has achieved. ‘It’s quite fascinating. They’re basically sacks of cottage cheese,’ she says, snapping on a fresh pair of plastic gloves. ‘Fancy a poke, lads?’ 

‘No, thank you,’ Jon says quickly. Next to him, Sam takes a half-step away from the steel table. ‘We’re just here for the toxicology report, if that’s alright.’ 

‘Suit yourselves.’ Nonplussed, Dr Maegyr peels the sheet away from the body on the table to reveal the pale, distended head and torso of Walder Frey. Sam’s hand flies to his mouth for half a moment before he remembers that they’re tough-as-shit MI5 officers, and forces it back down by his side. Jon swallows back a sudden surge of bile. The body smells like the riverbed from whence it was dug up, even in the clinical, frosty air of the morgue. Something of the slime, of ancient and natural rot.

‘They’re all like this, if you fancy a peek at the others.’ Dr Maegyr gestures to the five other covered slabs in her morgue. ‘Every single one of their insides liquified beyond recognition. Honestly, this is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. My interns haven’t eaten lunch in days.’ 

‘What do you reckon did this to them?’ asks Sam, sounding strangled, like he’s trying to speak without having to breathe too closely to the corpse. ‘What could do such a thing to a body?’ 

Dr Maegyr shrugs. ‘Absolutely no clue. But that’s the most brilliant thing about it.’ She bends over what’s left of Walder, squinting curiously at the strange, dark tracks snaking over the surface of his skin. ‘Whatever substance it is that killed them, it only became toxic once it reacted with the acid in their stomach, triggering an _insane_ antibiotic fallout that brought the whole house down, so to speak, along with any trace of the original toxin. Quite ingenious, really.’ She peers back up at Jon and Sam, arching a sculpted brow. ‘I’m guessing that’s why the-powers-that-be kicked this all the way upstairs to MI5?’

‘And there wasn’t any other evidence recovered from the bodies?’ asks Jon. ‘Any signs of a struggle?’

She shakes her head. ‘Nope. No DNA, no fingerprints, no nothing. Not so much of a papercut on any of them.’ Dr Maegyr sighs over the otherwise pristine condition of the Freys’ bodies. ‘The guys over at Organised Crime are out for your blood, you know. They’d been trying to pin down Walder for years.’ 

_Seven hells_. Jon does not have a single thought to spare for Oberyn Martell and his little cabal. ‘Well, maybe if they’d stopped playing cowboys for one bloody second and did their jobs properly, they’d still have a case. And Walder here,’ Jon says, nodding down at the corpse, ‘would still have a gastrointestinal tract. Not to mention his life.’

‘Also, until we figure out what’s in the toxin that killed them, we can’t rule out the potential of bioterrorism,’ Sam pipes up. ‘That’s a bit above Organised Crime’s pay grade.’ Jon clears this throat, and discreetly drives his elbow into Sam’s side. 

‘And mine,’ says Dr Maegyr, ‘but only because I know how much I get paid compared to you lot. So you’re not looking into it as a gang related killing, then?’ 

‘Well, only because poisoning isn’t really a common _modus operandi_ amongst —’ Sam begins, before yelping as Jon treads deliberately on his foot. 

Jon shoots the doctor a look across the table. ‘Stop prying, Talisa,’ he warns. ‘I’m serious.’ 

‘Like I said,’ she says, holding up her blue latex hands in mock surrender. ‘Above my pay grade.’ 

Once they finish, Sam makes for the exit at a half-run, but Jon hangs back and walks down the corridor with the doctor. They came up through King’s College together, so they exchange a few polite enquiries about mutual acquaintances — none of which either of them have any time to see anymore, they admit, due to the demands of the job and the onward rush of their friends’ lives: marriages, children, half-term holidays. Nothing either of them know anything about, but are nonetheless gratified to know exists, like foreign countries they’ll never visit.

Together they step out into the iridescent light of the afternoon. For a moment they stand on the threshold, breathing all of it in deeply and gratefully, happy to be out here and not in there, lying on a metal slab. Before she returns to her underworld of the dead, Dr Maegyr says, ‘Hey, Jon?’ 

He turns to face her. Dr Maegyr’s hands are in her pockets, and her face is angled away from him, towards the direction of the golden sun. ‘I’ll do what I can for you,’ she says, ‘but I’m not sorry to know that my nieces will now be able to walk to school without fear. Or that my nephews will never be recruited to run their drugs or traffic their women.’ 

‘I understand,’ Jon assures her. He feels it as well, all the time, even though he knows he shouldn’t. But somewhere along the way, the job always becomes personal. Every death claws something back from you; perhaps one day it won’t leave anything behind at all. One lives in hope, Jon thinks. 

‘I wanted to send them flowers,’ Dr Maegyr says. ‘That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw Walder Frey’s body on my table. A large bouquet of yellow daisies, and a card that reads, thank you for gutting the fucker.’ She opens her eyes, and lets the light spill into them. ‘All those years of fear and bloodshed, for it to end in such a pretty picture. Who would have thought?’ 

-

When he was called up for his first interview at MI5, Davos had insisted on making the journey with him, even though it’d been years since he’d been legally bound to Jon in any shape or form. But Davos had always been one of the best ones in the care system — one of the few that really gave a shit — with a steady way and seemingly endless patience for angry, broken boys.

Davos also loved a good, stern lecture, and had many in his arsenal for every formative moment in a young man’s life, like Saying No to Drugs and Reining in Our Pyromania to Taking Responsibility For Our Own Actions and Making Sensible Choices on the Cusp of Adulthood. Which was why it was strange how silent Davos was throughout the hour-long drive into the city, even as Jon’s own knee jumped up and down with nerves. But when they’d arrived, before Jon had a chance to unbuckle his seatbelt, Davos had reached out a hand and stopped him.

_Let me tell you._ He’d twisted himself around in the driver’s seat, looking at Jon with a solemn, wary expression. _Whatever happens, remember that it’s a job like any other._ _Don’t you go mistaking it for a calling, or else you’ll think it’s worth dying for. Do you hear me?_

Jon was barely listening. Above Davos’ head, through the window, he had seen the words inscribed on the fortress’ dark granite frontage: REGNUM DEFENDE. And it had felt like the temperature outside suddenly and perfectly aligned with the heat inside his own body. It was the ultimate appeal to his desperate, baser instincts, as a backwater orphan who craved the chance to prove himself; as an ill-gotten bastard who only wanted someone or something to redeem him and make him worthy.

-

‘The princess is here,’ Margaery announces as soon as he walks into their shared office without so much as glancing up from whatever time-lapse CCTV footage is flickering across her screen. ‘Interrogation Room Three, if you please.’ 

Jon frowns, shrugging off his suit jacket and tossing it onto the back of his chair. ‘Why did you put her there?’ he asks, unbuttoning his shirt cuffs. ‘She’s not a suspect. You could’ve put her somewhere more comfortable, like one of the waiting rooms.’ 

‘Not my call,’ Margaery says flatly, narrowing her eyes at a blurry knot of people that’ve coalesced in the corner of the video. ‘It was Shadrich’s, and Shadrich’s being his usual perv self. He put her there so that people can go in and gawk at her from the other side of the one-way mirror. I do believe something of a queue has formed down the corridor.’

Jon freezes. ‘What the _fuck_ ,’ he swears, with real feeling, as he quickly starts scrabbling together the files splayed across his desk. 

‘Can you blame them?’ drawls Margaery, those cunning eyes flickering up to observe him for the first time. ‘Almost everyone will have studied the great Ned Stark in their CRIM 101 module. Eye-fucking his daughter will be closest they’re ever gonna get to the legend himself.’ 

‘Pen, I need a pen,’ Jon desperately rifles through his desk drawers. ‘Shit. Marg? A pen?’ 

Margaery lazily twirls a biro in Jon’s general direction, which he gratefully snatches out of her hand as he hurtles back out the door. ‘Bronn will ask you to procure a DNA sample for “lab reasons”,’ she calls out after him. ‘I suggest you decline!’ 

There _is_ a queue, which at least has the good sense to immediately disperse like a flock of frightened geese when they see him come storming down the corridor. He rips open the door to Interrogation Room Three’s antechamber, and there’s Shadrich and _Harry Hardyng_ , of all the 24-karat shitheads he’s come across in his time, practically panting against the glass. ‘Out,’ Jon bites out, barely keeping his fury at bay. ‘Get out, before I chuck you both through the mirror myself.’ 

Shadrich has the decency to look sufficiently chagrined at being caught out, and tries to shuffle past Jon without meeting his eye, but Harry, the pompous twat, stands his ground. ‘C’mon Snow,’ he says, with a casual shrug that years of top-tier private education has calibrated to be both effortlessly charming and a bit wicked. It makes Jon want to rip his head clean off those shoulders. ‘It’s just a bit of fun. She’s a Stark, for fuck’s sake. Me and the lads were just curious to see if she had that infamous wolf look about her.’ 

Jon strides up to him until he’s a hair’s breadth away from the self-satisfied grin that’s quickly sliding off Harry’s face. ‘I don’t care how many government positions your father holds, or how many fancy friends you’ve got,’ Jon says softly, full of threat. ‘If you so much as breathe in a way that I deem disrespectful to anything and anyone pertaining to my case again, you’re going to have _no_ look about you.’ Jon pauses for a beat, lets the full history of what he’s done and what he’s capable of doing to rush into the gap. ‘Do we understand each other, Hardyng?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ Harry croaks out, suddenly looking rather peaky. ‘Sorry, Snow. Yes. I do.’ 

Jon jerks his head towards the door. ‘Get the fuck out of my sight.’

Once Harry’s scuttled off, Jon heaves a heavy sigh and runs a tired hand through his curls. Dropping his truly haphazard pile of papers on the desk, he returns to rolling up his loose shirt sleeves, and looks up to face the mirror. And that’s when he finally sees her, as she is now. 

Under the merciless fluorescence of Interrogation Room Three, she looks nothing like the girl in the photograph. Or the woman remains the girl, in essence, but with the details which had animated her then — the vulnerable, sloping little smile, the wary light in her eyes — have been folded away somewhere secret. Sansa Stark sits at the table with her hands clasped neartly in front of her, looking off into the middle distance. Hardly realising it, Jon takes a half-step closer to the mirror, her face a ghostly palimpsest over his own. Her red hair is tucked into her long oxblood coat, which she hasn’t taken off. She must be cold, Jon thinks distantly. Her hands are so pale. 

A strange riff runs up his spine at the sight of those hands, that face. 

-

He thought he was ready. But when he finally walks into Interrogation Room Three with his papers shuffled into an orderly pile under his arm, her blue eyes lift to meet his and immediately something goes haywire in his brain, like someone’s cracked open the back of his skull and ripped out the wiring, setting off the scream of alarm bells. 

Through years of training and pure instinct alone, he pulls out the chair across from her and manages to sit himself down into it. ‘Thank you for coming in today, Ms Stark,’ he says. ‘I’m very sorry about the wait.’ 

She draws her hands into her lap as Jon spreads his files and notepad across his side of the table, trying to appear as though he is capable of a single cogent thought. ‘It’s no problem at all,’ she replies. A polite, tentative smile flickers over her mouth. ‘It wasn’t very long at all, and your colleague was very accommodating.’ 

‘I’m sure he was.’ Jon flips open the file in front of him, pretends to read it and clicks open Margaery’s biro. ‘Now. Do you know why we’ve asked you to come in today?’ 

Sansa’s gaze flicks downward. ‘This is about my family, I suppose,’ she says slowly. ‘I’ve seen the news, about — the Freys.’ She takes a deep, steadying breath, as if just the act of saying their name has winded her. ‘I’m happy to help, but I doubt I’ll be of much use to you, I’m afraid. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had any meaningful contact with any of my siblings.’ 

‘Why don’t we start with the last time you did see them,’ he says, scribbling a string of nonsense words onto the notepad. _Threat. Estate. Meal. Mechanism._ ‘Let's begin with Robb. Are you aware of his current whereabouts?’ 

Sansa shakes her head. ‘No, though my guess is that he’d still be up north somewhere,’ she says. ‘I can’t imagine him anywhere else.’

‘And the last time you had any contact?’

‘Five years ago, when my aunt was dying. He — he came to see her, but my step-uncle wouldn’t let him come into her hospital room before she passed. He had been her favourite, you see.’ 

‘And Arya?’ 

Her mouth twists. ‘I must’ve been in the final year of my undergrad when she came to find me,’ she says. He can sense her fiddling with something beneath the table — _Ring. Curl. Finite. Fiscal._ ‘She wanted money to go to Braavos and start afresh, but I was just barely getting by on my scholarship as it was. She got it into her head that I was being purposefully withholding. I’m afraid we didn’t part on the best of terms.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he says, with only the vaguest sense of what he was apologising for. Internally, his cognitive meltdown is reaching a fever pitch. ‘And do you think they may have been involved with what happened to the Freys?’ 

‘When I knew my brother and sister, we were children,’ she says.

He scrawls _KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN_ , underlines it twice. ‘Then when they grew up, given the circumstances surrounding the death of your parents and brother,’ he says, keeping his head down. ‘Would they have been motivated to seek revenge?’ 

He thinks he feels her smile; but when he looks up at her, Sansa’s expression is as impassive as ever, like a lake frozen over. ‘That’s the incredible thing about children,’ she says. ‘They’re so full of potential.’

Jon realises he needs to start breathing properly in order to slow down his heart rate, which is galloping by on adrenaline; but breathing requires a set of working lungs, and his feel as though they’ve crystallised in his chest. _Focus, Snow_. When he was undercover, Jon once had to sit through a twelve-hour drive with the infamous Craster, twelve trafficked girls shivering in the cargo hold and a Beretta sweating in the cupholder between them. Having immersed himself in conditions of threat for so long, he knows only too well the slim shades of difference between safety and danger, and how easily the two can slip into each other’s guises, like hands in a glove. In the days and months since he’s resurfaced into normal life, every moment has felt as though he were careening into traffic with his brakes cuts.

But now he’s here in the room with her and her inscrutable look, and the rush is there but the fear is gone. He wants to jump. He wants to put his hands on the wheel and drive. 

Jon clicks the biro closed, sets it down in front of him. ‘Are you frightened of them, Ms Stark?’ 

There it is — an imperceptible shift behind the eyes, the flash of a shining fin before it’s swallowed up again by the heavy depths. But it’s a real and living thing, all the same. ‘No,’ she says, ‘should I be?’ 

He clasps his hands together on the table and leans forward, in a way that’s meant to convey both calm reassurance and steady, implicit pressure. ‘I’m just wondering if there’s any reason why you might not feel comfortable being forthcoming with us,’ he says. ‘I wanted to assure you that we can keep you safe.’ 

Now she does smile, but it’s sort of — sad. Like she knows something that he cannot even begin to understand, and she’s sorry. For what, or why, who knows; but Jon wants to, badly. ‘The might of Her Majesty’s Secret Service behind me,’ she muses. ‘Who wouldn’t be reassured?’ 

When extracting information from an asset, there’s always going to be a pinch point over which they’ll waver. Helping them over this threshold will require the handler to demonstrate a gesture of trust or goodwill. They teach all the new recruits how to do this in training, and Margaery is a particular master. She knows just when to soften the lines of her face, to pitch her voice and drape her arm over them, covering their shoulder with her sweet-smelling hair. She leaves no asset unturned. 

Jon usually balks at such tactics. It took him months to work up the courage to touch Ygritte. But suddenly he has a wild impulse to take Sansa’s hand over the table and say _trust me_ , _whatever it is you’re afraid of, I won’t let it happen to you_ , even though the first and most important rule of this job is never to make promises you can’t keep, unless you’re undercover. Then you can say whatever the hell you like. Consequences only apply in civilian life, because there’s that expectation packaged in the word itself: civility, goodness, law-abiding. People end up dead all the same.

He wonders if she’d still be cold to the touch, when he feels as though he’s running a fever. He wonders — absurdly, foolishly and unhelpfully — about the press of her hand against his forehead, his cheek. Her steady, honest pulse by his mouth, ready to confess everything.

-

After an hour on the phone with an obliging woman named Mya from the Eyrie Registry Office, Jon walks into the huddle room to find Brienne shouting, ‘You don’t even have any _proof_ ,’ and gesticulating wildly in front of the whiteboard that is now covered in Stannis’ spidery writing and aggressive lines shooting out in every direction. The man loves a good chart, the more convoluted the better — like, say, a psychopath would. ‘You cannot dedicate department resources and manpower based on a _conspiracy theory_.’ 

Margaery gives Jon a disapproving once-over as he comes to lean on the wall next to her. ‘Why is your hair wet,’ she mutters out the corner of her mouth, as Stannis and Brienne’s row steadily escalates in both volume and pitch. 

‘No reason,’ Jon says, pulling at his collar, which is also now uncomfortably damp. ‘Just splashed some water over my face.’ _As I re-educated myself on the finer mechanics of breathing in the men’s upstairs loo, no big deal_.

Margaery’s expression deepens into scorn. ‘Oh gods,’ she says, with not a small amount of disgust. ‘Not you too.’ 

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He glances over her crossed arms. ‘Is that coffee in your mug there?’ 

‘If you can’t figure it out, then you’re in the wrong line of work, mate.’ She stretches out a hand. ‘And it is, but give me back my biro first. I know what you’re like, you absolute scrounger.’ Jon makes a face and presses it into her palm. 

‘Fascist. It’s not even a uniball.’ 

‘I’ve been in post for a decade,’ Stannis grinds out, red in the face. ‘I steadied the ship through Blackwater and the bombing at Harrenhal. I know a terrorist when I see one, and this man,’ — he stabs a furious finger towards the mugshot of Robb Stark, poised in the centre of his psychotic web — ‘is responsible for the murder of the Freys. I know he is. He was groomed by Ned Stark, for fuck’s sake, _and_ he’s got a record the length of the Kingsroad. The man’s a born killer.’

Brienne scoffs. ‘Yes, let’s take a look at this record, shall we?’ she says icily, before snatching up a sheaf of paper from atop a pile on the table before them. ‘Let’s see here — three counts of assault, one for battery, and a handful of minor charges for theft, public drunkenness and public urination.’ She waves the sheet in front of Stannis’ face, which is rapidly taking on the look and colour of chiselled granite. The immovable object to Brienne’s unstoppable force. ‘Robb Stark may not be getting a knighthood anytime soon, but do you really think someone who got caught _pissing against a lamppost_ is capable of something as sophisticated as poisoning the entire Frey family and disposing of their bodies? You’re blinded by your own prejudice, Stannis. You want Robb Stark to fit the profile, but he doesn’t. We need to be looking into the families that actually have the means to do something like this. Like the Lannisters.’ 

Margaery silently passes her coffee mug to Jon, which has the words Gin O’Clock emblazoned on the front in golden curlicues. ‘Thank you,’ he whispers. 

‘It’s decaf,’ she whispers back. 

‘The Lannisters might have the means, but they don’t have the motive,’ Stannis grinds out. ‘And by all the gods, the Starks do.’ 

‘Yes, but who _didn’t_ want the Freys dead?’ Brienne retorts. ‘Even before they broke the guest right, they weren’t exactly winning any popularity contests amongst the other families, were they? And all the known associates to the Stark family are now either dead or they’ve pledged to the Boltons. Robb Stark has no resources and no allies to help him pull something off of this scale.’ 

‘There’s the sister —’

Brienne throws up her hands in exasperation, or perhaps to curtail an impulse to wrap themselves around Stannis’ throat. ‘Yes, Arya, the little sister with another string of ASBOs to her name. Compelling stuff. There’s something of a difference between petty crime and cold-blooded mass murder, though you’ve never had any sense of proportion when it comes to the quote-unquote “criminal lowlifes”, have you Stannis?’ 

Stannis’ eye twitches. ‘I meant the _other_ sister, Sansa or — whatever.’ He turns on his heel towards Jon. ‘You,’ he barks. ‘What did you get out of her?’ 

Jon takes his time throwing back the grainy dregs of Margaery’s coffee because he hates, _hates_ ever having to take Stannis’ side on anything. Especially against Brienne, who has proven herself to be a startling competent and fearless Head of Technical Ops ever since she was drafted in from GCHQ six months ago. ‘Nothing concrete,’ he says. ‘She confirmed again that she hasn’t had a relationship with either sibling since they were kids, and all her phone and email records dating back these past two years attest to that. The step-uncle who took her in after her parents were killed recently passed away, but we should start interviewing friends and colleagues to corroborate that account.’ 

But Stannis is already turning back to his whiteboard of horror. ‘There’s no need,’ he says, waving a dismissive hand. ‘We’ve got far more important fish to fry than Sansa Stark, I should think.’ 

Jon can feel his pulse begin to ratchet up again; the slow clicking of the gears in his heart, winding him up tighter and tighter. Pulling everything into focus, like a lens distilling light from the sun. There’s a part of him that still loves it, he realises now — he thought it’d died and rusted away with Ygritte, with Edd, but fifteen minutes of breathing the same air as Ned Stark’s daughter jolted something loose, and there’s the thrill beneath his skin again, ticking away, burnishing brighter and brighter. ‘There is a need, actually,’ he says. ‘Because she’s a liar.’ 

Both Stannis and Brienne wheel around simultaneously, like a comedy double act. Next to him, Margaery raises an approving brow. She lives for a bit of workplace drama, and it’s not often that Jon can be relied upon to deliver. ‘How do you know this?’ demands Brienne. ‘And I need evidence please, not more conjecture.’ 

Jon passes Margaery back her Gin O’Clock mug; it’s not quite the right look for arguing a case like the one he’s about to make. ‘I know because lying used to be my job,’ he says, pulling out the folder he’d had pinned under the crook of his elbow. ‘She’s a very good one though, I’ll give her that.’ 

‘Spare me the dramatics,’ says Stannis, as if a staff memo from M hadn’t once sent him spiralling into a two-week sulk. ‘What did she say about Robb Stark?’ 

For her expedient work in service of the realm, Mya from the Eyrie Registry Office will be receiving a basket of fruit in the post tomorrow morning. ‘Ms Stark told me the last time she saw her brother was when her aunt, Lysa Arryn, was dying in hospital.’ Jon flips open the folder and pulls out a copy of Lysa’s last will and testament. ‘She said he was her favourite. But in Ms Arryn’s will, she leaves something to each of her sister’s living daughters, and nothing for Robb.’ 

There is a long beat of mixed silence in the room, as Jon places the document atop the already paper-strewn table, for their perusal. ‘And is that —’ Brienne says, with palpable disbelief, ‘is that it?’ 

‘Well, yes,’ says Jon, and Brienne frowns, her lips pressing into a thoroughly unimpressed line. Jon’s seen her hack into a remote server like it’s child’s play, but having never worked in human intelligence prior to this posting, Brienne sometimes needs convincing as to the random, illogical ways that people work. She’s still got the shine of that GCHQ abstracted high-mindedness about her, whereas the rest of them have been wading in the muck of human (mis)behaviour for years now. ‘But it’s enough. People tend to embellish their stories when they lie, and often those details don’t hold up to scrutiny.’ 

‘She could have just been nervous,’ Brienne points out. ‘Or there might be other reasons why Lysa Arryn didn’t leave anything to her nephew. Normal families are complicated enough; these lot even more so.’ 

‘But she doesn’t leave anything to Brandon either, suggesting a preference for Catelyn Stark’s daughters, not Robb in particular,’ Jon argues. ‘I think she felt as though she needed to justify Robb’s appearance at the Eyrie and overcompensated. Isn’t that strange?’ 

‘MI5 does not hang its hat on _strange_ , Snow,’ says Stannis, lip curling. ‘We’re intelligence officers, not ghostbusters.’ 

Finally, Margaery inserts herself into the fray. ‘Oh c’mon, Stannis,’ she drawls. ‘Jon’s arguing your corner. I bet you’re just pissed that you underestimated a female suspect, _again_.’ 

‘I am not —’ A livid flush begins creeping up Stannis’ sinewy neck. ‘I did not — I know that women can be very —’

Brienne holds up a hand. ‘I’m going to stop you right there,’ she says. ‘I don’t have time to schedule more sensitivity training for you this month.’ Then she drops it and turns to face Jon properly with a hard, appraising look, probably wishing he were a squiggle of code instead, or an algorithm she could run to its natural conclusion. Jon doesn’t know what she finds, but somehow, it’s enough. ‘Fine,’ she says, flatly. ‘You and Stannis have a month to deal with whatever — this is.’ She waves towards the whiteboard behind her, before closing her eyes with a sigh and massaging her temples. ‘And Margaery, if you haven’t any objections, you’re with me on the Lannisters. Now, if there’s nothing else that needs attending to in this foul business, I’m off to feed my doubts to a Pret lunch.’ 

‘Oh hurray,’ Margaery says cheerfully. ‘The dream team.’ She throws Jon a wink before she and her obnoxious mug follow Brienne’s solid tread out the door, leaving him alone in the stony silence with Stannis and his gimlet eye.

‘Your finest work yet.’ Jon gestures at the whiteboard. ‘The arrows, they’re very… emphatic.’ 

‘Do I need to worry about you?’ Stannis asks gruffly, out of the blue. His arms are crossed and his shoulders are bunched up by his ears, like he’s physically recoiling from having to have this conversation with his subordinate. Jon tries to suppress a grin; and Stannis, misreading the twist in Jon’s mouth, convulses slightly. ‘I mean, legally, you need to tell me now if having you working this case is going to be a problem. I don’t want any of the gory details, mind you, there are other people for that —’ 

‘No sir, you don’t,’ Jon assures him, ‘I’m fine,’ and Stannis gives a curt nod, his posture immediately relaxing. Fine is a wildly relative term, but old guard like Stannis tend to believe that any officer standing upright is fit for duty, and for this Jon is immensely grateful. Stannis may insist upon the rules, but his withering contempt for psych evaluations is the only thing that stands between Jon and a future mouldering away in a dusty corner of MI5 bureaucracy. Risk assessment, maybe, or whichever department steams open the envelopes and re-seals them after their contents have been read and/or altered to better fit the narrative. That’s essentially what they’re all doing, in a way, grubbing in the filth for a better story to tell about us, about the country and how safe you are at any given time. But this job is the only one he knows; it’s certainly the only thing he’s good at. He also knows there’s nothing else out there for him — just a startlingly colourful number of ways it could end. And he’s made peace with almost all of them. Just as long as he never has to look back, not ever. 

Satisfied that they’ve drawn a line under the issue of Jon’s mental health, Stannis turns once more to face his masterpiece, clasping his hands behind his back like a soldier awaiting his marching orders. ‘We’re going to get these fuckers,’ Stannis says with a certain relish, eyes roving over the tangled connections only he can make out. ‘We’re going to flush them out. Root to leaf.’ 

Jon comes up next to him. Up close, it looks even more deranged, like a Pollock on speed, or like someone's hurled a plate of spaghetti bolognese against a wall. Regardless of what Stannis sees, Jon follows the lines that lead to her outdated photograph, away in the corner like a child hovering on the edges, waiting to be found. Alayne Stone. Sansa Stark. 

‘Whatever you say,’ he says, distractedly.


End file.
